Oxygen Art Centre’s Author Reading Series Presents Tiziana La Melia and Fan Wu
Tiziana La Melia and Fan Wu will read online for Oxygen Art Centre’s final Author Reading Series event of the season, 23 February (images provided by the authors)
Join Oxygen Art Centre on Wednesday the 23rd of February at 7:00 PM PST for an online reading featuring painter-poet, Tiziana La Melia, and poet-critic, Fan Wu. The evening will open with readings from students in the Selkirk College creative writing program.
Tiziana La Melia’s The Eyelash and the Monochrome asks: what happens when material becomes thought and thought becomes object?
At once a book of poetry and an artist’s book, it gathers together poems, performance scripts, and parallel texts, illustrating the hybrid nature of these texts and trespassing upon the boundaries of genre. It is a book about enmeshment, about the potentiality of interplay. It is a conversation. It is not linear, but it interrogates and explores the line: lines of text, lines of dialogue, socio-economic lines drawn or crossed, lines that were the trails of snails… Everything is a signifier, meaning is elastic, and references are multi-faceted. La Melia’s multivalent and generative practice lives in process; it thinks through materials (paint, objects, non-human forms) with violent sentimentality, excessive desire, naiveté, narrative construction, and an awareness of the body and memory.
Fan Wu is a poet, editor, critic, and founding member of the Toronto Experimental Translation Collective. He is a frequent contributor to Canadian arts publications, a very good dancer, and has responded to contemporary exhibitions as an essayist and storyteller. Core to Wu’s writing practice are eclectic participatory performances that draw on collective experimentation, inspired by sensual, convivial energies. Wu collects the erotic qualities of language and offers them to us, placating a lack in our always desiring minds.
Student writer, musician, and reader, Stevie Rose Polling will join us from the Selkirk College creative writing program.
Anyone interested can register on Eventbrite through the following link. https://www.eventbrite.ca/x/author-reading-series-tiziana-la-melia-and-fan-wu-tickets-240546831047
Copies of The Eyelash and the Monochrome can be ordered online here. The edited collection Mourning Anthology, can be ordered online here.
More information is available on Oxygen’s website, as well as recordings of previous events. Admission is free or by donation. The Author Reading Series is generously supported by Columbia Kootenay Cultural Alliance.
Author Biographies:
Tiziana La Melia is an artist and writer. Born in Palermo, Italy, and raised on an orchard, she currently resides on the unceded territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. She is the author of two books and is currently working on a dual language book titled I come from a long line of people who don’t use words (Archive Books 2022), Kletic Kink, a forthcoming poetry album and The Simple Life: A Drama Between Mice consisting of video, confessions, drawings, clothing mood boards, and a collaborative tabloid magazine. Recent solo and collaborative exhibitions include Fly Robin Fly, Mecedes du Sud, Montpellier (2021); Global Cows, Damien and the Love Guru, Brussels (2019/2020); St. Agatha’s Stink Script, galerie anne baurrault, Paris (2019); Garden Gossip, Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff (2017-18); Vancouver Special: Ambivalent Pleasures, Vancouver Art Gallery,(2016-17); Down to Write You This Poem Sat, Oakville Galleries, Oakville (2016); Pigeon Looks for Death Between the Needle and the Haystack, Unit 17, Vancouver (2018). Her writing has appeared in Art21, Organism for Poetic Research, C Magazine, and The Interjection Calendar, among others.
Fan Wu is the squeezed remnant of a quest for vitality. He’s currently working on an obsessive project on the strange intersections between Georges Bataille and Daoist philosophy. Send him a love letter or a grievance at fanwu4u@gmail.com.
Student Writer Biographies:
Stevie Rose Poling is a first-year student in the University Arts and Sciences course. She was born in Trail but at age 7 she and her family moved to Melbourne, Australia, where she grew up. Stevie moved back to the Kootenays in March 2021 and has loved every minute of it. Alongside being a Creative Writing student, she is a musician and artist. Stevie loves incorporating poetry and literary references into all art forms she practises. She views art and writing as an emotional outlet and is recently beginning to share her work. Stevie is studying to become a secondary school art teacher and hopes to inspire the future generations to love art and literature as much as she does.
Image Credit: Photographs contributed by the authors.